The Anatomy of Melancholy

The air threatens us with its atmospheric disturbances, thunder and lightning, excessive heat and cold, mighty winds, storms and unseasonable weather. These bring scarcity, famine, plague and every sort of epidemic disease, consuming countless multitudes. In Cairo in Egypt, every third year, as Botero and others report, 300,000 die of plague; and 200,000 in Constantinople every fifth year, or every seventh at the latest.

How the earth terrifies and crushes us with dreadful earthquakes, most frequent in China, Japan and those eastern regions, sometimes swallowing six cities at once! How the water rages in floods and incursions, overthrowing towns, cities, villages and bridges, besides causing shipwrecks! Whole islands in Zeeland and Holland are sometimes suddenly overwhelmed with all their inhabitants, and many parts of the mainland drowned, as at Lake Erne in Ireland. “And in the open strait we see nothing but the corpses of citadels.”

In the marshes of Friesland in 1230, storms caused the sea to drown “many thousands of people, and beasts beyond number”—almost the whole country, with its people and cattle. How fire rages, that merciless element, consuming entire cities in an instant! What town of any age or importance has not, once and again, been disfigured, ruined and left desolate by its fury? In a word,

The wave drowns him whom fire has spared; The force of pestilent air kills him snatched from the sea; The survivor of war wastes away and dies of disease.

Whom fire spares, the sea drowns; whom the sea spares, Pestilent air sends to the grave; Whom war lets escape, sickness carries away.

To come to particulars: how many creatures are at deadly enmity with us—lions, wolves, bears and so on? Some attack with hooves, horns, tusks, teeth or claws. How many harmful serpents and venomous creatures stand ready to hurt us with their sting, breath or gaze, or to kill us outright? How many dangerous fish, plants, gums, fruits, seeds and flowers could I name at once, many of which cause grievous illness, if not death itself, merely through smell, touch or taste? Some speak of a thousand different poisons. Yet these are trifles by comparison.

The greatest enemy of humanity is humanity itself. At the devil’s instigation, a person is always ready to do harm: his own executioner, a wolf, a devil to himself and others. We are all brothers in Christ, or at least should be, members of one body, servants of one Lord; yet no fiend can torment, trample on, tyrannize over or harass people as one human being does another. “Do not let me fall,” therefore, says David, when offered war, plague or famine, “into human hands”—the hands of merciless, wicked people:

They are scarcely human, scarcely worthy of the name, And have more savage cruelty than wolves.

For the most part we can foresee these epidemic diseases, and probably avoid them. Our astrologers predict scarcity, storms and plagues; earthquakes, floods, collapsing houses and consuming fires come gradually, or give some warning sound beforehand. But no skill can avert human knavery, deceit, injustice and villainy. We can keep avowed enemies out of our cities with gates, walls and towers, and defend ourselves against thieves and robbers with vigilance and weapons. Yet no precaution can turn aside this human malice and its harmful schemes; no watchfulness can foresee them. We have so many secret plots and devices for hurting one another.